New web series dares to dream of a life without rent

Brendan Bradley has known homelessness. But unlike the majority of those who struggle to find shelter or a place to sleep, the 27-year-old North Carolina native’s greatest struggle stemmed from the challenge of extracting comedy from hardship.

Bradley is the creator, writer and director of Squatters, a new comedic web series on Dailymotion.com that follows the exploits of two 20-something Manhattanites who, galvanized by increasingly hard-to-ignore eviction notices and mounting frustrations with the very institution of paid residency, seek to live rent-free for one year in New York City’s most aspired-to borough.

The concept for the show came to Bradley out of his own experiences making do without the security and peace of mind afforded by a steady place to live.

“I was couch surfing in Los Angeles when I first moved here,” Bradley said. “I’d lived in New York City for six years, and I had spent a little bit of time ‘between places.’”

Crafting humor from a subject traditionally treated with utmost sensitivity posed a definite challenge for Bradley while conceiving the series — his mission to derive laughs from homelessness would have to be handled very delicately.

“I had this idea to have a character that’s in and out,” Bradley explained. “It grew and grew until I was like, ‘Well, you know, homelessness isn’t very funny, so what would be a way that two guys could be essentially homeless and it have kind of a challenge element and kind of a fun element to it.’ And that’s where the stupid bet came from.”

The stupid bet Bradley is referring to was one made between his character Hank Pitman and Hank’s best friend and pre-eviction roommate, Alex Selkirk, played by Erik Scott Smith, Bradley’s real-life friend and co-star in the short film Weak Species. In the pair’s efforts to outlast one another without violating the three stipulations of the challenge — no paying for a place to sleep, no staying with friends or family, no leaving Manhattan — the first two episodes of the series have already found Alex constructing an elaborate bed-like contraption under the desk in his cubicle and Hank hunkering down for overnight prison stints and engaging in impromptu adult slumber parties.

Since beginning work on the series, Bradley knew that there was only once place a show like Squatters could be set.

“People talk about New York City being the hardest place to live, and that kind of ‘if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere mentality,’” Bradley said. “All of us think about rent, no matter where we are in the world. But especially in New York City, you know, where you’re paying a lot more for a lot less. And people get creative as it is with sleeping arrangements in New York, so I thought that that would be the perfect playground for [the show].”

Though certain segments were filmed in Los Angeles, where Bradley and Smith currently reside, a good deal of the show was filmed on location in the Big Apple.

“We filmed a lot of interior stuff in Los Angeles,” Bradley said, “but then we went to New York for a week and filmed all of the exterior stuff, the subway stuff and then a few of the actual, very New York apartments.”

Bradley’s previous work on web-based projects like Comedy Central’s The Legend of Neil and the improv-oriented Apocalyptic Playground would suggest that he might have written Squatters with the Internet in mind as a front-runner candidate for a potential medium, but Bradley said that wasn’t the case.

“I wrote it as a pilot — the first three episodes are actually a single television pilot, like a standard half-hour comedy,” Bradley said. “But just because the industry — the way it is right now — seems like the webspace is a great place for development and experimentation, and I’ve had so much success producing web content on a commercial level that I basically was like, this is the perfect platform to introduce this storyline.”

Securing the eight-episode contract Squatters currently has with video streaming website Dailymotion didn’t happen until three of the short webisodes had already been shot and put together. Bradley was open to the idea of pitching the product as either a television pilot to networks or a web series to online platforms.

In addition to being tapped by Dailymotion to create the website’s first original comedic series, Bradley and the Squatters crew were pleasantly surprised around the same time by talk radio personality Frank Kramer’s interest in the project.

Kramer, of 790 KABC’s hugely successful 9 a.m.-to-noon program Frosty, Heidi and Frank, had previously worked with Bradley on an advertising campaign that aired on KTLA and the Dodgers Stadium Jumbotron promoting the talk radio trio’s arrival to AM airwaves. Kramer stepped on board in the capacity of executive producer after being impressed by the work that had already been done on the series. His involvement in Squatters marks the first time he has tried his hand at producing visual content, let alone for the Internet.

Bradley said he’s grateful for all of Kramer’s support, both creatively and financially.

“He was actually incredibly supportive,” Bradley said. “He knew the script, he knew the stories, he’d seen the first three episodes and so he really trusted us to basically do more of the same … as long as we don’t go buck wild.”

According to Bradley, Kramer oversaw the production process in a sort of grandfatherly spirit, and despite Kramer’s significant investment in the project, his presence was never heavy-handed.

“He’s the big daddy,” Bradley said. “He gave us an allowance and said, ‘Kids, don’t get arrested, but have a lot of fun.’ And so we went out and had a lot of fun and made a good show.”

New episodes of Squatters come out Mondays on Dailymotion.com.